I. Field
The present invention relates generally to data communication, and more specifically to pilot transmission, channel estimation, and time tracking in a multi-carrier communication system.
II. Background
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation technique that effectively partitions the overall system bandwidth into multiple orthogonal frequency subbands. These subbands are also referred to as tones, subcarriers, bins, and frequency channels. With OFDM, each subband is associated with a respective subcarrier that may be modulated with data.
In an OFDM system, a transmitting entity processes data to obtain modulation symbols and further performs OFDM modulation on the modulation symbols to generate OFDM symbols. The transmitting entity then conditions and transmits the OFDM symbols via a communication channel. A receiving entity typically needs to obtain relatively accurate symbol timing in order to recover the data sent by the transmitting entity. The receiving entity often does not know the time at which each OFDM symbol is sent by the transmitting entity nor the propagation delay introduced by the communication channel. The receiving entity would then need to ascertain the timing of each OFDM symbol received via the communication channel in order to properly perform the complementary OFDM demodulation on the received OFDM symbol. The receiving entity also needs a good estimate of the response of the communication channel in order to perform data detection to obtain good estimates of the modulation symbols sent by the transmitting entity.
The transmitting entity expends system resources to support channel estimation and time tracking, and the receiving entity also consumes resources to perform these tasks. The resources used by the transmitting and receiving entities for channel estimation and time tracking represent overhead. Thus, it is desirable to minimize the amount of resources expended by both the transmitting and receiving entities for these tasks.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently support channel estimation and time tracking in an OFDM system.